Hate is a strong word, but when it comes to people who directly link to, and show images stored on someone else's server using (or should I say stealing) bandwidth, I find it a complete and totally appropriate word use.

I hate hotlinkers, especially the ones who send you messages informing you that you (the person who owns the webspace, that the image in question is being stolen from, resulting in the usage of bandwidth that you pay for) are a "bad" person because you (the website owner) chose to remove the image in question, and replace it with something else.

Now some of you might be saying to yourselves, why don't I just use hotlink protection? Well I tried that once for a little while, and for some reason, it was legitimately blocking all images from showing on my own websites, becoming a huge pain in the you know what - so I turned hotlink protection off.

I'm sick of hotlinkers, which are usually blog writers who use a free service, warez sites and forum posters. Sometimes I don't mind when images that are located on my sites are placed into a forum thread, because if I can pick it up quick enough, I can replace it with an advertisement for the site that bandwidth is being stolen from, or replace it with something naughty.

Take care and stay safe.
Rik (contact/comments)

As outlined in the very first Groundzero Webmaster Blog entry, I had planned to put in at least one blog entry every week. If you take a look at the date of the last blog entry and compare it to this one, you will notice there is a 44 day difference.

So much for the weekly blog entry plan.

At least it wasn't because I'm lazy (it usually is but not in this case for once). However I did decide to take a little time out for a couple of weeks over the Christmas/New Years period, but after that I was back to the old webmaster duties with redesigns for a couple of my sites, and updates on this and other websites.

Sounds like a good enough reason to me.

Take care and stay safe.
Rik (contact/comments)

I was reading the Sitepoint Tribune the other day and it stated that Internet Explorer has lost some of it's market share to Mozilla Firefox. When I finished reading that, I quickly realized that I have been a Firefox convert for a few weeks now.

I've been surfing the web since 1998, and remembered starting with Netscape Navigator (can't remember which version) and then changing over to Internet Explorer 4 later on, and sticking with it to version 6 until just recently.

Now I've never had major problems with I.E (thanks to the fact that I turned ActiveX controls off along with other precautions) but, I have seen first hand what kind of damage unauthorized software downloads/add-ons and other assorted Browser Helper Objects can do to a system owned by a novice user.

As a webmaster, I hope more web surfers take advantage of Firefox because it helps lessen the influence and affects that Spyware, Parasiteware and BHO's have on a webpage.

Take care and stay safe.
Rik (contact/comments)

Welcome to a new look Groundzero and the first entry into the Groundzero Webmaster Blog. The plan is to post here once a week and talk about anything relating to being a webmaster (whatever that means), and hopefully more than 2 people (not including myself) will read this thing, so here's hoping.

Now I know everyone and their dog has a blog, and it looks like I'm just jumping onto the bandwagon - well that's exactly what I'm doing. I know I'm a bit late with the whole web log thing but I've always been behind when it comes to trends and, I have become quite used to this.

To be quite honest, up till now I've only read a couple of random blogs and I don't really have that much of an opinion on them. I don't even know if I'm using a generally accepted blog format, the good thing is that I don't really care.

For example, have I written too much or too little, do I have to have an automated comment system to go with this blog (at the moment I haven't implemented one), have I waited too long and missed the blog train (which is quite possible) and will anyone actually read this thing.

???????????

Take care and stay safe.
Rik (contact/comments)